Magnet-implanting DIY biohackers pave the way for mainstream adoption

When Lepht Anonym hit the world stage in 2011 to describe how she cut open her flesh with vodka-sterilised vegetable peelers to stick bits of metal under her skin, there were probably a fair few intakes of breath. There was also a huge sigh of relief from a rapidly growing minority. Her words sowed a seed in the minds of people who had long-harboured thoughts of being superhuman, of fulfilling a childhood fantasy and becoming a cyborg. That seed said it was ok to experiment and suggested, instead of waiting for the impossible to happen, why not pick up your (sterilised) tools and make something possible happen today. "I heard about finger magnets in April and by May I had an implant," Tim Cannon, co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based DIY bodyhacking group Grindhouse Wetware tells Wired.co.uk. "As soon as I heard that you could get this extra sense, I was blown away. Now I can feel electromagnetic fields."

Grinders, DIY biohackers or garage body mods; however Cannon and his team of body augmentation enthusiasts refer to themselves, one thing is clear -- the principles of their practice lie in transhumanism. They are under no illusion that what they are doing is groundbreaking stuff -- Kevin Warwick of Reading University implanted a RFID transmitter under his skin in 1998 and the practice of slicing up your own flesh has apparently become so commonplace that one tattoo artist recently stuck four magnets under his skin to hold his iPod nano in place. Cannon and his team, however, are adamant that while the mainstream transhumanist theorists continue to talk big, they are altering and enhancing their bodies now.

Don't miss: Transhuman Week "The magnet is attractive because it's this small thing that's so simple, but gives you a new sense of the world," says Grindhouse member Lucas Dimoveo. "It acts like a low-level digital human implement -- all you have to do is build a machine to interact with it."

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The team is currently working on two devices -- the Heleed (Human Embedded Light Emitting Dioede Display), an implant that logs data like body temperature and heart rate and uploads it via Bluetooth, and a compass implanted in the calf that vibrates according to which direction a user is facing.

Everything is open source and all materials are bioproofed, usually with a Parylene C coating -- the aim is to make the process as safe and transparent as possible. Though there are plenty of videos online instructing happy-go-lucky scalpel-wielders how to implant finger magnets, Grindhouse goes the route of the tattoo artist every time and does not condone self-implantation (it often results in decreased sensitivity if nerves are damaged). "We don't agree with cutting yourself open with a vegetable peeler," asserts Dimoveo. "I personally think that's irresponsible and gave us a bad name with the mainstream transhumanist community. "There are still misperceptions about what [we do], so the new grinder community is trying to take the name grinder and make it more responsible. It's about bringing more scientific method into it -- curiosity is good, but having a methodology and a hint of professionalism in the hacker frame [is the way to change perceptions]."

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Grindhouse hopes its tempered approach will help make DIY body modification acceptable with the general public. "Lepht was a pioneer and an innovator, but she was clearly not someone society would want to get tax advice from," says Cannon, who works as a programmer for a cloud computing company by day. "But when I come up with my two kids and a career that pays [well], they think maybe rational minded stable human beings are involved in this, not just punk rockers who cut themselves."

Products such as the Heleed are key to the group's push into the mainstream. Through them, they are showing the public that they can experience something completely novel -- and cheaply. The team has a backlog of orders for its £63 Bottlenose device, which translates sonar, UV, WiFi and thermal data into a magnetic field, so that users' with neodymium magnet implants can experiment with new sensations. Cannon sees the pick-up of these products as a gateway to a future of popular transhumansim. "If your freaky cousin gets one, and then your next door neighbor gets LEDs in his skin, that's how things start to come into being. You can't say 'oh we've got those arms perfected go ahead and cut yours off'. It has to be tangible first. If you went back to the 50s and tried to rock a Mohawk you'd get your ass kicked because it's too jarring. It has to be that someone pierces something weird, then he gets beat up for a while, other people get daring, it becomes socially acceptable, then you become socially numb and its commonplace -- something teenage girls do to piss off their fathers."

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Cannon, the everyman role model, is certainly not averse to having his arms sliced off one day. "A lot of people think about it as one of those things you do out of necessity, but necessity is one of those things where the goal post is constantly moving. I think people will raise the bar as to what they find to be an acceptable life -- if everybody else is seeing in UV and you're not even willing to put on a pair of glasses, that's going to redefine the landscape of how you perceive your life". The goal post is indeed rising -- while replacing your heart might have been considered appalling to the general public 60 years ago, we are now eagerly genetically modifying pigs to one day fulfill the organ transplant demand. When the University of Toronto's Steve Mann was

assaulted in a Parisian café this year for wearing his EyeTap glasses -- an augmented reality device attached to his skull -- it looked as though we might be entering the first phase, as Cannon describes it, of assimilating to what is acceptable. Let's hope the socially numb phase beats out the bullying one soon.

For Cannon, as with most transhumanists, his work is ultimately about not being limited by the constraints of our own biology.

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Since he speculates about one day having a 3D printer that can "print you into any shape or physical form you want", his dream mod may come as a surprise -- an artificial heart. This is mainly because he has a history of heart disease in his family, partly because he eats bacon four times a day and definitely because of how he would feel with a pulseless heart not beating inside his chest. "It puts me in this realm where I think, I'm replacing one organ, time to replace them all -- and that's immortality."

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One transhumanist who is most definitely considered mainstream is not particularly impressed with Cannon's dream mod, nor Grindhouse's particular brand of biohacking. "The first heart replacement was in the 60s -- this is normal!" Natasha Vita-More tells Wired.co.uk. "And that's an old concept. We don't need organs. The whole idea of pissing and pooping is old world -- we eat to get energy, otherwise we don't need to eat. [It's about asking] if we didn't eat, how would we get energy -- from the Sun or other mechanisms?"

If Vita-More sounds a little incredulous at a practical transhumanist's musings, that's because she pioneered the movement in the early 80s, before the term had even been coined. Perhaps most well-known for her Primo Posthuman model -- a design for a hypothetical human body based on "emerging and speculative technologies" -- she has little patience for what she considers "silly", amateur practices and prefers "user-designer biohacking". "Getting a magnet implant is not a big deal because Kevin Warwick did that a long time ago. It's more of an emotional statement than doing anything useful."

Grindhouse is well-versed in these kinds of reactions. Though Warwick himself cited the work the project does, Cannon says the general consensus from the transhumanist community is that the team is "stupid for dreaming".

Vita-More does concede, however, that Grindhouse's work with electromagnetic fields is "pretty cool", though rudimentary. Here, the Pittsburgh-based project gets away with the novelty by ensuring it is all about enhancement. Where Grindhouse doesn't get away with things, is when one of the team proclaims on the website that mainstream transhumanists are doing nothing to bring about the movement's true realisation. "That is a fricking lie and it pisses me off," says Vita-More bluntly. "Transhumanism is being done but people aren't bragging about it. Anyone can hack into the body, but what are you doing it for is the question. To damage the body because of psychological issues or to find some kind of resolve and curiosity, to make the body perform better -- then it's called human enhancement. But hackers can do very interesting and sophisticated things, so it has an important part in the transhumanist scope. [Hacking really means] to learn about a system and create additional functions and performance, and that is the transhumanist approach."

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If Vita-More appears to have come full circle in her opinion of the group, it's because there is an uneasy tension between the movement's DIY doers and its theorists. She has some respect for some of the things the team is accomplishing, but in her own words the project "lacks vision" (her work is all about design-based interventions, imagining a better way for our bodies to function in the future). Tinkering is one thing, but she sees herself and her peers as transhumainsts in the purer sense. For instance, during her PhD she focused on practical applications such as artificial eye lens replacement (due to cataracts) and manipulating bone density through nutrition. It certainly lacks the drama of Grindhouse's projects (and is not so dissimilar from Cannon wanting to replace his heart) -- however, done in a clinical setting with an inter-disciplinary approach and the proper investigative processes, it also has the scientific merit to back it up that Dimoveo says is essential to making body hacking widely accepted.

Vita-More's body mod [lens replacement] is practical and an enhancement (though, in her own words "it was a waste of $3,500 because it doesn't work that well"); Grindhouse's is, in Cannon's words, "recreational".

Straying into prophecising about the future is as endemic when speaking to Grindhouse as it is pioneer Vita-More. The rhetoric of both easily slips into musings of the theoretical dream-self.

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Grindhouse, however, is working on adapting the tools they already have in a manner that is considered, curious and extremely effective. Their products are the ideal pathway from underground misconceptions about body-cutting computer hackers to a mainstream popular culture of LED-lit skin-implanted transhumanist teens. By opting for this tact and embracing the fun side of transhumanism, Cannon is hoping the team is playing its part in nurturing the world's first bodyhacking pop star. "Mainstream DIY transhumanism will be complete when the five-years-from-now equivalent of Lady Gaga has base-reacting LEDs that map out musical tones -- that's when it's going to be the argument with the 14-year-old girl and her dad."

Until then, Cannon will prepare for the cyber punk future fantasy he first imagined when playing Shadowrun as a child, a game where a dystopian image of megacorporations owning organ replacement technologies prepped Cannon for a lifetime spent promoting open source transhumanism. In a small way, he is protecting the possibility of that future so that one day he will see what's on the other side. "Some people say simplicity is a better life and accepting limitations is good," says Cannon. "Other people try to rise above their constraints and see if there is something worth seeing from that vantage point and if not, keep climbing. I'm a climbing guy."